Thank you For the opportunity to appear before you today.
The first thing I want to say is that it's in everyone's interest to get the indigenous procurement policies and practices correct. The best way to get results for us is for first nations themselves to be in a position of providing the design and supports for the procurement program, and you're going to hear from everyone today about that. You've just heard from Jody.
I think you have to start by recognizing also that first nations themselves were legislated out of the Canadian economy for much of Canada's history. We were denied the ability to leave reserves, to get bank loans, to get an education, to hire a lawyer, and entering in commercial contracts was near impossible. Most of my career as a member of the Squamish Nation has been focused on getting first nations back into the economy, and the procurement policy is a great vehicle to support economic reconciliation.
While there may have been challenges with Canada's procurement policy over the last number of years, which we don't need to go into, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Let's get to the point where we support first nations participation in the development and the design of the policies that we need to support indigenous participation in the procurement policy.
I want to give you an example of what procurement policy can do for a first nation. I'm a member of the board of Trans Mountain pipeline, the expansion project, and 24% of the contracts on the expansion project were provided to indigenous businesses and partnerships, which totalled nearly $6 billion since 2016. As the expansion moved along, TMX identified specific business opportunities along each section of the expansion project. It communicated these to indigenous communities and identified the potential partners through our vendor system.
Indigenous businesses need to have a line of sight to the opportunity, and they need the opportunity to scale up to respond to the opportunities that are before them. At the end of the day, what it meant to one particular community was very extensive. The Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation provided services to the oil field, to forestry and to security services across western Canada. It had a significant impact in that community. It was the largest source of independent income for the Alexis and was the largest employer of Alexis members. I think it's important to understand that these are significant opportunities for first nation communities as they move forward and as they look towards economic reconciliation.
I think that we need multiple activities to take place concurrently. Jody spoke about the need for bonding. We need to improve the access to capital, I believe, with NACCA to be able to support entrepreneurs moving forward to scale up their business opportunities.
It's always a challenge, I guess. The 5% target is a very worthy target, and I think we should do things that allow us to move forward in doing that. Supporting the creation of first nation organizations and institutions I think is going to be an important part of that. We've had, under the legislation, the ability to stand up an infrastructure institute for 16 months, and we're still waiting to get that done. We have to start moving at the speed of business in the processes that we established, and I look forward to the opportunity to do this.
In closing, I just want to say that the indigenous procurement program is an integral part of economic reconciliation. It needs to be supported, and the first nation organizations like the ones you have today need to be supported. We need to look at the ways and means in which that can be achieved. I know Jody didn't speak about it, but Ernie might. We want the ability to securitize federal capital transfers. That's going to be an important way of supporting economic reconciliation—to support that whole process of bridging the infrastructure gap.
Thank you.